Dianetics is an Adventure

DIANETICS IS AN ADVENTURE. It is an exploration into Terra Incognita, the human mind, that vast and hitherto unknown realm half an inch back of our foreheads. The discoveries and developments which made the formulation of Dianetics possible occupied many years of exact research and careful testing.This was exploration; it was also consolidation.

The trail is blazed, the routes are sufficiently mapped for you to voyage in safety into your own mind and recover there your full inherent potential, which is not, we now know, low but very, very high.

As you progress in therapy, the adventure is yours to know why you did what you did when you did it, to know what caused those Dark and Unknown Fears which came in nightmares as a child, to know where your moments of pain and pleasure lay. There is much which an individual does not know about himself, about his parents, about his “motives.” Some of the things you will find may astonish you, for the most important data of your life may be not memory, but engrams* in the hidden depths of your mind: not articulate, but only destructive.

You will find many reasons why you “cannot get well” and you will know at length, when you find the dictating lines in the engrams, how amusing those reasons are, especially to you.

Dianetics is no solemn adventure. For all that it has to do with suffering and loss, its end is always laughter—so foolish, so misinterpreted were the things which caused the woe… You are beginning an adventure. Treat it as an adventure. And may you never be the same again.

L. Ron Hubbard – From Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

*engram: any moment of greater or lesser “unconsciousness” on the part of the analytical mind which permits the reactive mind to record; the total content of that moment with all perceptics